SHORT AND TO THE POINT
Academy Award nominees provide some of the most moving images of the year
Oscar Nominated Shorts Now playing
They are the orphan outliers of the Oscars race.
Their flustered winners are seldom recognizable faces or names. But the short-film nominees — five each in the categories of animation, live-action and documentary — are often some of the most moving images of the year. And this year is no exception.
In the animation category, the odds-on favourite would seem to be Kitbull, in which a scrappy kitten befriends an unexpectedly gentle pit bull. It’s a Pixar production, and marks the 10th straight year that either Pixar or its parent Disney has had a nominee, four of which have won.
But the standout is Memorable, a French short in which an aging painter and his wife struggle with his dementia. The other nominees also deal with family relationships: Daughter features a girl tending to her ill father; Hair Love is about a father taming his daughter’s unruly hair; and Sister, “dedicated to the siblings we never had,” is a melancholy rebuke of China’s former onechild policy.
The live-action shorts also feature A Sister, a Belgian film in which a woman’s phone call to emergency services becomes a mystery to unravel for the operator. (It’s essentially a 16-minute version of the 2018 Danish film The Guilty.)
The nominees also include Brotherhood, by Montreal-based Meryam Joobeur, about tensions that engulf a Tunisian family when the eldest son returns home from Syria with a wife.
Nefta Football Club, also set in Tunisia and unexpectedly funny, tells the story of two kids who find a stash of white powder in the desert.
And Saria dramatizes the true story of a 2017 tragedy in a Guatemalan orphanage.
My money’s on The Neighbors’ Window, written and directed by Marshall Curry, whose past nominations include feature documentaries Street Fight (2005) and If a Tree Falls (2011) and the doc short A Night at the Garden (2017).
This one, about a couple’s obsession with the people across the street, is a heartbreaker. You’ll figure out what’s coming before the characters do, but once they catch up with you, it will wring you out all over again — all in 20 minutes.
Canadian Sami Khan could win an Oscar in the best short documentary category for St. Louis Superman, a powerful look at the life and career of battle rapper and former Missouri State Representative Bruce Franks
Jr. It was co-directed by Smriti Mundhra.
Their competition comes from all around the world. In the Absence explores the 2014 sinking of a passenger ferry in South Korea.
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) is about Skateistan, a non-profit school in Kabul that includes female students and teaches reading, ’riting and riding. Life Overtakes Me examines an odd, coma-like illness affecting refugee children in Sweden. And Walk Run Cha-cha follows a Vietnamese couple now living in the U.S. and learning ballroom dancing.